History will judge Rishi Sunak kindly

00:00 07:02

Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’ did Margaret Thatcher immense damage. The ‘winter of discontent’ has become too easy a shorthand for the coinciding of deep-seated problems which Thatcher herself approached with great caution.

‘Dementia tax’ was an expression critically important in the ultimate downfall of a prime minister, Theresa May, who had proposed a rational means of underwriting care for the elderly: not, in fact, that any new tax should be levied upon them or anyone else, but that when assessing eligibility for a taxpayer’s contribution to their care costs, the value of their house should no longer be excluded from the estimate of their means. Arrangements were available for them to keep the house until they died by drawing current income against its future value. The real losers, those who stood to inherit, were never going to like the idea, but the term ‘dementia tax’ misled millions more into regarding the proposal with horror.

This general election is set, I’m afraid, to add another sweeping statement, as fluent as it is glib, to the list of killer phrases, rooting itself in the national imagination. We have most assuredly not had ‘14 years of Tory misrule’. But you’ll hardly find any media commentary on this election that does not contain the words ‘14 years’ followed by one or another generalised castigation of Conservative government.